For much of American history, our country had no formally established church but it did have a soft religious establishment -- Protestant at first and then Judeo-Christian -- that shaped and grounded our national debates. In the 1960s and 1970s, the collapse of the Protestant Mainline dissolved that center, and our culture wars should be understood as the attempts by different forces to fill that void: Evangelicals and Catholics in the George W. Bush era, "awokened" progressivism today. Even in a supposedly secularized society, our conflicts remain religious, reflecting a quest for a moral and metaphysical consensus that, for now, eludes our grasp.

We were joined by Ross Douthat, New York Times opinion columnist.

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